Samsung Pay adds Rewards, offering points for every transaction

Samsung is giving customers a new incentive to use Samsung Pay, its mobile payments product. The company released Samsung Rewards today, which is a program that provides points whenever a user uses their Samsung Pay for a transaction. The points gathered through the program can then be exchanged for rewards including gift cards, Samsung products, and more from various U.S. retailers.

The new program tiers reward levels based on thresholds of transactions, giving users “Silver” status for five payments in a month, which earns double the points. 20 transactions results in a “Gold” status, which delivers triple points, and 30 monthly Pay uses puts a user in the “Platinum” rewards group, where each purchase is worth four times the usual amount in points earned.

The rewards program also comes with a built-in chance to win instant prizes, which are updated monthly,and Samsung will let people track all of the Rewards-related activity in the Samsung Pay app.

All of this is clearly about incentivizing use, and that’s something basically anyone operating in the mobile payments space is going to need to do in order to spur faster adoption. A universal reward program that isn’t dependent on participation by any individual merchants or payment network is a smart move, since it puts control over the nature and availability of the rewards program entirely in Samsung’s hands – and Samsung is the stakeholder that has the most to gain from the system working out.